leonarde

A very valuable skein of evidence---as relates to
the blood AND to the possible age of the Shroud is
available here:
<a href="http://www.earthfiles.com/earth026.html" target="_blank">http://www.earthfiles.com/earth026.html</a>

If the Sudarium of Oviedo covered the head of the
same person as the Shroud of Turin did then that
establishes a MINIMAL age of perhaps 1300 years
(the approximate time the Sudarium of Oviedo has
been in Spain).

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: leonarde ]</p>

leonarde

A serious artist (who is also a physicist!)who has
made extensive studies on the feasibility of an
artistic medieval forgery, and ruled out such a
possibility (for artistic/technical reasons of all
sorts is available here:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/piczek.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/piczek.htm</a>
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/piczek2.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/piczek2.htm</a>
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/piczek3.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/piczek3.htm</a>

That's 3 URLs from the same woman Isabel Piczeck.
Cheers!

leonarde

Another very detailed site (pro-authenticity) is
from Meacham, who is a professional archaeologist.
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/meacham2.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/meacham2.htm</a>

leonarde

A very informative email exchange between a skeptic and a pro-authenticity investigator is
here:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/lombatti.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/lombatti.htm</a>

They go over, among other things, the possibility
that coins were placed over the eyes of the dead
man and that in enhanced photos an imprint of the
coins is visible IF great effort is made. This is
a more speculative aspect of Shroud research.

leonarde

For the largest group of technical papers on the
Shroud (that I am aware of) (and it is a pro-authenticity site) look at:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/papers.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/papers.htm</a>

leonarde

For a 4 page thread dealing with this topic, a
thread started by me at the ARN forum (recently
shut down due to invaders!) see:
<a href="http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001122.html" target="_blank">http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001122.html</a>

leonarde

A very good paper dealing with the floral images
and pollen in/on the Shroud is available here (acrobat format):
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/iannone.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/iannone.pdf</a>
Most investigators believe that fresh-picked/bought flowers, all of them indigeneous to the Near East, were placed IN the
Shroud at the time of burial...

leonarde

For a treatment of the theory that the Shroud image (ie the image of the man in the Shroud) is
a sort of protophotograph see:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/orvieto.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/orvieto.pdf</a>

The paper was written by Barrie Schwortz, the
official photographer of the Shroud of Turin
Research Project of 1978 to 1981. Although he is
Jewish, he believes in authenticity.

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: leonarde ]</p>

leonarde

The invention and use of photography in the 19th
Century opened up a new era in the history of the
Shroud and the controversy surrounding its authenticity.

This is from a very detailed chronology of
the Shroud by Ian Wilson, one of the top
popularizers of the Shroud in the English-speaking world.

May 28, 1898: Public exhibition. Secondo Pia, an Italian amateur photographer, makes the first photograph of the Shroud of Turin. It ushers in a new era in the Shroud's history, the era of science.

1900: Canon Ulysse Chevalier's Etude critique sur l'origine du Saint Suaire de Lirey-Chambry-Turin is published in Paris, detailing the d' Arcis memorandum and other mediaeval documents indicating the Shroud's fraudulence.

April 21, 1902: (Monday afternoon) Agnostic anatomy professor Yves Delage presents a paper on the Shroud to the Academy of Sciences, Paris, arguing for the Shroud's medical and general scientific convincingness, and stating his opinion that it genuinely wrapped the body of Christ.

(Evening) Secretary for the physics section of the Academy, Marcelin Berthelot, inventor of thermo-chemistry, and a militant atheist, orders Delage to rewrite his paper (for publication in the Comptes rendus de l' Acadmie des Sciences) so that it treats only on the vaporography of zinc and makes no allusion to the Shroud or to Christ.

April 23, 1902: Paris edition of New York Herald carries headline, 'Photographs of Christ's Body found by science'.

April 27, 1902: Paris edition of New York Herald carries headline, 'Scientists Denounce Turin's Holy Shroud. M. Leopold Delisle tells Academy of Inscriptions "the claim has not been proved"'.

The above is part of a long chronology at:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/history.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/history.htm</a>

leonarde

Another sub-controversy surrounding the Shroud of
Turin is the question of the (ostensible)blood on
it. Walter McCrone, a microscopist of solid repute
looked at the "blood" and proclaimed it....medieval pigment. The other members of the
Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) challenged this and this led the McCrone's resignation (ie that the others would not accept
his results uncritically). As you perhaps know
by now, I am an authenticity adherent. Piczek's
URLs indicate why the "blood" could NOT be pigment
----medieval or otherwise.
Yet even if we eliminate paint that still
leaves the question: what is the "blood" really? What convinced me of the realness of
the blood was a book by John H. Heller called
"Report on the Shroud of Turin" (1983, Houghton Mifflin Company)that details the efforts by STURP members to determine whether the "blood" was blood. The book reads a bit like a detective story but this is not the Sherlock Holmesian one-man-knows-all-the-answers story. Rather it is a picture of the intellectual give and take that, one likes to think, is characteristic of the best in scientific collegiality.
The total STURP team was composed of about
forty members: scientists from a broad array
of specializations. Naturally though, there
was some division of the labor: scientist X
looking at just that aspect of the Shroud that was most amenable to his area of expertise.
Author Heller and fellow STURP member A. Adler concentrated to a large degree on the "blood". Their determination that it was indeed blood is best summarized by reproducing a table on this subject from page 215 of Heller's book:

Table 5
Tests confirming the presence of whole blood
on the Shroud.

1. High iron in blood areas by X-ray fluorescence.
2.Indicative reflection spectra.
3.Indicative microspectrophotometric transmission spectra.
4.Chemical generation of characteristic porphyrin fluorescence.
5.Positive hemochromogen tests.
6.Positive cyanomethemoglobin tests.
7.Positive detection of bile pigments.
8.Positive demonstration of protein.
9.Positive indication of albumin.
10.Protease tests, leaving no residue.
11.Positive immunological test for human albumin.
12.Microscopic appearance as compared with
appropriate controls.
13.Forensic judgement of the appearance of
the various wound and blood marks.

Now: a confession: several of the above points register in my scientifically illiterate mind as: gobbledygook. That was true when I first read the book 10 to 15 years ago and it is true now. Still even the total layman like me can tell that they pulled all the stops to determine that it WAS blood on that
Shroud.
Cheers!